Wednesday’s top tech news: CES gets smart about peeing

Render of the Withings U-Scan and app screenshots

Yesterday’s trickle of CES announcements has turned into a flood today. The best place to keep up with them is over on our dedicated CES 2023 page, but I wanted to use today’s roundup to highlight a couple that piqued my interest.

First up is this delightfully wacky gadget from Withings. It’s called the U-Scan, and it’s a small puck that you mount in your toilet to take urine samples as you pee throughout the day. It’s meant as a simple way to keep track of your reproductive health and nutrition, without the invasiveness of blood testing, and despite sounding a little gross, I’m really intrigued by this kind of ambient health monitoring.

Second are Samsung’s CES TV announcements, which are particularly interesting after it’s gotten back into the OLED game. Most exciting is a brand new 77-inch QD-OLED, but there are also new Mini LED, and quantum dot LCD TVs further down the range.

Finally, Qi wireless charging is getting an upgrade this year thanks to Apple, which is allowing MagSafe to provide the basis of the new Qi2 standard. It means the company’s ring of magnets might not be exclusive to iPhones for much longer. Check out Sean’s writeup for all the details.

Anyway, here’s a silly tweet to start your day:

Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Wendesday, January 4th, 2022.

Belkin will make its most popular accessories with recycled plastics.

That includes many of its wireless chargers, power banks, wall chargers, and car chargers, which will now consist of 73 to 75 percent post-consumer recycled plastics.

But as our science reporter Justine Calma points out, electronics made with recycled plastics still don’t do much to solve the e-waste problem. That’s because companies have to use new plastics to reinforce recycled plastics that have deteriorated over time:

All those weaknesses with plastic also make it more difficult to recycle something that’s already been made with recycled materials. There comes a point when plastic can’t even be downcycled anymore. When it reaches that point, it’s typically incinerated or sent to landfills.
The exec in charge of Roku’s new TVs came from… TCL.

Roku hasn’t said who is building the new TVs it just announced at CES, but it’s fascinating they have ex-TCL exec Chris Larson running things. A little badge engineering goes a long way, I suppose.
Jan 4, 2023, 4:33 PM UTCMia Sato

In an email sent to Vimeo workers and posted online, CEO Anjali Sud said ‘ongoing cost discipline’ was necessary to keep the company sustainable.
Jan 4, 2023, 4:16 PM UTCMitchell Clark

The upgrade kit will let you add HomeKit and Matter control to your existing roller shades. Matter means it’ll work on all major smart home platforms, not just Apple’s.
Jan 4, 2023, 4:15 PM UTCAntonio G. Di Benedetto

The Lumix S5II is mostly an incremental update, but its hybrid phase-detect autofocus system may be a turning point for Panasonic playing some much-needed catch-up. And a sick, blacked-out S5IIx variant is coming later.
Jan 4, 2023, 4:14 PM UTCEmma Roth

As part of a settlement with New York regulators, the cryptocurrency exchange must also invest an additional $50 million in a compliance program.
Jan 4, 2023, 4:00 PM UTCChris Welch

This time LG’s gimmick for the Signature OLED doesn’t have anything to do with the panel itself. The important part is a little wireless transmitter box — not the giant 97-inch screen.
Naughty Dog shared some new concept art for its forthcoming TLOU multiplayer spinoff.

In a 10th-anniversary celebration post to keep the hype train at a steady hum in anticipation of the HBO premiere of its The Last Of Us adaptation,

Neil Druckmann said that the multiplayer game will incorporate Naughty Dog’s signature approach to storytelling (so expect it to try to make you cry by killing a cute but fungi-fied creature) and that they would have more to share about the game later this year.

For now, fans can content themselves with The Last Of Us Part 1 launching on PC on March 3rd and The Last Of Us’ HBO premiere on January 15th.

Naughty Dog
How to watch LG’s CES 2023 event.

We’ve already got some details on LG’s 2023 OLED TVs, but that was just the beginning of LG’s TV announcements ahead of CES 2023.

LG’s press conference starts today at 11AM ET, and we’re bound to see more TVs, home entertainment products, and the usual assortment of home appliances. You can tune into LG’s live stream at 11AM ET / 8AM PT in the YouTube stream below.
Green light.

The CES madness in Las Vegas has begun, Twitter is broken in Australia, and someone else has probably scored 50 or more points in an NBA game since I started writing this.

You can keep up with all the CES stories in our stream, and below, I’ve listed times for some of the events we expect to have news from today. Keep an eye on the front page here; if there are live streams available, we’ll post them so you can follow along.

LG: 11AM ET / 8AM PT

Samsung: 5PM ET / 2PM PT

Sony: 8PM ET / 5PM PT

AMD: 9:30PM ET / 6:30PM PT

BMW: 11PM ET / 8PM PT
Jan 4, 2023, 1:00 PM UTCMonica Chin

HP’s new Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is a consumer offshoot of the premium, very expensive Dragonfly Chromebook. It’s launching alongside a Windows model in spring 2023.
Twitter users in Australia are having a bad day.

Elon Musk’s $44 billion hobby has been up and down for over 12 hours in Australia and New Zealand, according to Downdetector. Users are reporting slow load times when the site does actually load, causing some to fire up a VPN to access Twitter through the US.

A sampling of Twitter users complaining about issues.
Jan 4, 2023, 10:31 AM UTCTom Warren

ChatGPT made conversational AI accessible, now Microsoft is rumored to be integrating the machine learning techniques behind it into Bing search queries.
Jan 4, 2023, 10:14 AM UTCJon Porter

After a class-action lawsuit, Apple has agreed to a $50 million settlement for MacBook owners that had to replace their keyboard or individual keys.
Two Samsung projectors can automatically create one giant image.

We weren’t impressed by the $900 original, but the 2023 Freestyle has a neat little trick called Smart Edge Blending that automatically stitches the images of two projectors into a single ultra-wide display with a 21:9 aspect ratio.

Only catch? If buying one Freestyle wasn’t worth it, who’d actually buy two?

Our roundup has more details about the refreshed Freestyle and the rest of Samsung’s new TV lineup.

Two 2023 Freestyles projecting a single ultra-wide image at CES in Las Vegas.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

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